How Active Are China’s Top Social Networks?

Internet companies are terribly secretive about key figures including total registered users, and the most crucial one, monthly active users. The figures that are released they tend to be exaggerated or outright false. What is then another measure of site activity?

China’s social-sharing button provider Jiathis.com provided data from the last six months to show the level of activity on China’s top 5 social sites: QZone, Tencent Weibo, Sina Weibo, Renren and Kaixin001.

For each social site, JiaThis measures ‘shares’ (the amount of content shared via China’s top social sites) and ‘click rate’ (the number of clicks on those links, a measure of quality). Here’s an analysis of Jiathis‘ monthly tracking data for the top 5 sites.

1). Shares (Via China’s Top 5 Social Sites)

• Tencent’s Qzone is the leader, but has declined slightly in the face of increasing competition from Weibo. Qzone is a nickname social network with some similarities to both Facebook, MySpace, and MSN Spaces. Over the last 6 months it has now dropped from 13.6% of content shared to 10%, a 27% decline.
• Sina Weibo has basically stayed flat over the last 6 months in terms of content shared, in relative terms.
• Tencent Weibo is the big gainer, with its share increases from 2.0% to 7.5% over the past four months. Tencent has run aggressive online and offline ads campaigns for its Weibo, including one during the Chinese New Year’s Gala, the biggest TV event of the year. Tencent Weibo recently claimed 223 million registered users and 115 million active users.
• Social networks Renren and Kaixin0001 are hovering at 2-3% of total volume of content shared. The rise of Weibo sites has pushed Renren and Kaixin001 out of the dominant positions they held back in 2009.

2). Click Rate (For Links Shared via China’s Top 5 Social Sites)

The click rate is a measure of the quality of links shared and activeness of the userbase. After all, ‘shares’ only matter if they generate traffic, if other users click on them.

• Tencent’s Qzone has shown a sharp upsurge in click rates, rising from 7% to 38%. Tencent has made a number of renovations to Qzone and is attempting to update it into a better social network—more like Facebook and less like MSN Spaces.
• Sina Weibo’s return click rate has risen from 19% to 24%. Yet competition has grown of late, with a strong push by Tencent Weibo.
• Tencent Weibo’s return click rate has risen from 3% to 7%. Tencent Weibo is now synchronized to more and more of Tencent’s other social products, like Qzone and QQ IM.
• Renren and Kaixin001 still hover below 5%.

There’s no single dominant social network in China. It’s a fragmented market with fierce competition, although Weibo sites seem to be on the rise. In a nutshell, the Twitter clones are beating the Facebook clones in China.